John Bell (sculptor)

His works were shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and he was responsible for the marble group representing "America" on the Albert Memorial in London.

The next year he exhibited A Girl at a Brook and John the Baptist at the academy, and two statuettes at the Suffolk Street Gallery, followed by Ariel in 1834.

Although the mournful appearance of the figures reflected the public mood over the wasteful Crimean War, critics were dismayed by the lack of the customary heroic poses.

[8] In 1868, Bell created a female nude from grey-veined marble named The Octoroon, a woman whose one eighth percentage of African blood renders her a slave.

[9] According to Mia L. Bagneris it "reflects Victorian Britain’s fascination with the enslaved, American, mixed-race beauty and suggests provocative resonances between the antebellum South and the Orient in the popular imagination."

[12] His sculpture of Shakespeare at the 1851 exhibition was used by John Leech as the centrepiece of his cartoon Dinner-time at the Crystal Palace, published in Punch.

In 2022, the curators of The Colour of Anxiety, an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which shows two of Bell´s sculptures The Manacled Slave/On the Sea Shore and The Octoroon, have commented that " While white male sculptors such as John Bell and Charles Cordier intended to bring the pathos of the institution of slavery to public attention, yet they nonetheless traded on the allure of illicit sexuality born of that same system.